Foodily, FreshDirect start recipe delivery service

Courtesy of a new service called Popcart, New Yorkers can now order all the ingredients of a given dish with a click of a button.

FreshDirect is partnering up with social-recipe website Foodily to launch Popcart.

The social-recipe website Foodily teamed up with digital grocer FreshDirect on Tuesday and launched a new service called Popcart. It allows users to order deliveries of food ingredients directly from online recipes, and will operate exclusively with FreshDirect for an undisclosed time period.

Once a customer has installed the free Popcart bookmarklet, they can highlight any online recipe and access a pop-up window with the ingredients required, which can then be bundled together and delivered the next day by FreshDirect. According to the two companies, the Internet is the most popular recipe source for home cooks, but shopping for ingredients is widely seen as a time-consuming challenge. The new technology will link more than 150 million food website and blogs to the FreshDirect purchasing portal.

"What we really aim to do with this is to deliver a completely new experience for consumers, where they can move from a recipe that inspires them to the actual ingredients to make it in a 24-hour period," said Foodily Chief Executive Officer Andrea Cutright. "It turns a recipe instantly into something that you can buy."

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Foodily was founded by former Yahoo employees in San Mateo, California, in 2010 with $5 million in venture support from Index Ventures. The site brings in recipes from across the Internet and allows users to browse recipes through social search, based on what the user and his or her friends have recommended. The company released an iPhone app in 2011 and received additional funding in 2013. The company's partnership with FreshDirect is the first step in offering Popcart service nation-wide, said Ms. Cutright.

"This is really at the heart and soul of making food shopping easier for consumers," said Jodi Kahn, chief consumer officer for FreshDirect. "About 70% of New Yorkers cook from scratch multiple times a week, and 30% cook multiple times a day. Think about that opportunity."

FreshDirect made its first food delivery in New York in 2002, and today if employs nearly 3,000 people here, according to a company spokeswoman. The new partnership will initially bring Popcart to FreshDirect's service areas in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia and parts of Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Delaware. Ms. Cutright and Ms. Kahn declined to comment on how revenue from Popcart purchases will be divided between the two companies. FreshDirect would not share user numbers or revenue information, but the company has "grown very significantly" in recent years, said Ms. Kahn.

Popcart went live on the FreshDirect and Foodily websites in FreshDirect's service areas on Tuesday. The service design focuses on user choices, with options to choose between types and brands for each ingredient, using the same market-based pricing as the FreshDirect website. The launch will give the company the chance to get feedback from users that could also lead to new features, said Ms. Cutright.

"There are other apps that let you make a list, but you still have to go to a grocery story," said Ms. Cutright. "This is the only one in the U.S. that lets you instantaneously make an order."